Franziska Deutsch
Jacobs University Bremen | School of Humanities and Social Sciences | f.deutsch@jacobs-university.de

First published: September 2009
Most recent version available at http://www.livingreviews.org/lrd-2009-4
We review the literature on the relation between socio-economic development and political democracy,
a field that is commonly known as modernization theory. Guided by the seminal contribution of Lipset
(1959), we assess the evolution of this literature along two major dimensions: (1) robustness of the
relationship between economic development and democracy and (2) substantiation of the causal
mechanism. The evidence to date suggests that Lipset’s original thesis does indeed find empirical
support, and that certain structural conditions are conducive to stable democracy.

Introduction
Few questions in political science have been studied as
extensively as the relation between socio-economic development
and political democracy. Are poor countries less likely to be
democratic than rich countries? And if yes, why is this so? Most
generally these are the questions we aim to answer in this paper.
We will do so by reviewing theoretical arguments and empirical
evidence concerning what is commonly known as
modernization theory. This field of research is indebted to the
tradition of Lipset (1959), who in his seminal contribution first
laid out the research agenda. Thus, contrary to elite-oriented
(sometimes called agency) approaches to the study of
democratization (e.g., O’Donnell & Schmitter 1986), this paper
is concerned with the structural and societal conditions
conducive to democracy, especially in the socio-economic
domain.
The paper proceeds as follows: In the next section, we review
Lipset’s (1959, 1960) original account of the relation between
socio-economic development and political democracy. We then
discuss early qualitative and quantitative studies on the topic, as
well as influential critiques of modernization theory. Next, we
are concerned with more recent developments in the studies on
socio-economic development and democracy. In particular, we
provide an overview of influential studies on the robustness of
the relationship between economic development and democracy.
Here, our focus is on the study by Przeworski et al. (2000;
Przeworski & Limongi 1997), which is perhaps the most
influential and most heavily debated study in recent years. We
then go beyond macro-correlations and review recent
substantiation of the causal mechanism by focusing on the
contributions by Boix (2003), Acemoglu and Robinson (2005)
and Inglehart and Welzel (2005). The final section summarizes
and concludes.

Lipset’s Thesis: Conditions of Democracy
At a time when democratic forms of government were the
exception rather than the rule, it was Lipset who in his seminal
1959 piece Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic

Development and Political Development1 first established the
theoretical link between the level of development of a given
country and its probability of being democratic: “the more wellto-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain
democracy” (Lipset 1959, 75). Without a doubt this notion has
since become conventional wisdom. Leaving aside some
methodological flaws,2 Lipset (1959, 1960) was able to confirm
a suspected correlation between democracy and development on
empirical grounds in one of the earliest empirical comparative
studies, and it is not by chance that his 1959 article ranks
amongst the all-time top-ten citations of the discipline’s
flagship-journal, the American Political Science Review
(Siegelman 2006).
Yet, it appears that Lipset is more frequently cited than read, as
he is often misrepresented in reducing his complex theory to a
simplistic understanding of economic development in a narrow
economic sense. In other words, Lipset is often attributed with
positing a simple correlation between per capita income and
democracy, when in fact he deliberately argued more broadly
that “all the various aspects of economic development –
industrialization, urbanization, wealth, and education – are so
closely interrelated as to form one major factor which has the
political correlate of democracy” (Lipset 1960, 41). It is this list
of factors which constitute the conditions, not necessarily
causes, for democracy according to Lipset.
In this context, for any democratic regime to survive, it must
provide sufficient legitimacy as perceived by its citizens. This,
Lipset argued, is typically achieved by continuous economic
development (effectiveness). At the same time, drawing heavily
on Marx, Lipset emphasized the strengthened role of the middle
class in a modernized society by pointing towards the social
mechanisms. Here equality is central, both in socio-political
terms and in economic terms. “The gap between income of
professional and semi-professional (…) and ordinary workers
(…) is much wider in poorer than in developed countries”
(Lipset 1960, 49). Thus, modernization according to Lipset
manifests itself largely through changing social conditions that
foster a democratic culture. Stronger in human capital,
1The article was re-published in virtually identical form as chapter 2 of
Lipset (1960)
2 For instance, Lipset used different criteria to classify countries as
democratic or not depending on their geographical location.

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Living Reviews in Democracy, 2009 | 1

especially education, and exposed to wider and more diverse
audiences (e.g., within voluntary associations), workers in
developed countries are more receptive towards democratic
values of tolerance and less so towards regime-hostile ideologies
(Lipset 1959, 84). This is especially true when workers are
granted economic and political rights. Indeed, modernization
increases the receptiveness to the type of norms and values that
mitigate conflict, penalize extremist groups, and reward
moderate democratic parties (Lipset 1959, 83-84).

Figure 1: Modernization Theory according to Lipset

In this context, it is particularly redistribution and citizenship
that prevent workers from revolutionary struggle and the
resulting economic equality that allows for effective democracy:
“A society divided between a large impoverished mass and a
small favored elite would result either in oligarchy (…) or in
tyranny” (Lipset 1959, 75).
On the micro-level, Lipset’s account of democratization was
strongly informed by Lerner (1958), who had identified
urbanization, education and communication (media) to be core
factors in the process of individual modernization and political
participation. Lerner had pointed out that with widespread
education the ruling elite’s fear of a country ruled by an unruly
mass, incapable of informed decision, subsides, whereas it was
Lipset who drew the connections between micro-level
modernization and macro-level democracy, and conducted the
empirical testing. Thus, Lipset’s theory is in essence a cultural
one.
In sum, economic development — like urbanization, wealth and
education — in Lipset’s account works as a mediating variable
that is part of a larger syndrome of conditions favorable to
democratization. Kitschelt (2003) has called this a “deep”
explanation in which economic development works through the
syndrome of conditions. However, because the causal arrow is
not unidirectional, Lipset deliberately chose requisites instead of
prerequisites of democracy as the title of his article, indicating a
correlational, not causal, relationship between socio-economic
development and democracy, while the quantifier some suggests
a probabilistic, not deterministic, association. Notwithstanding,
none of the conditions is considered a sufficient condition for
democracy.

Early Studies
From the list of conditions of democracy derived by Lipset,
economic development is the single one variable which has
attracted the bulk of attention of other scholars. While Rostow
(1960) had theorized the path from economic modernization to
democracy as linear and inevitable, Moore (1966) formulated a

historical analysis and critique in which socio-economic
development — industrialization in particular — does not
necessarily translate into the intermediary variables that are
conducive to democracy. Moore saw ‘three routes to the modern
world’: the liberal democratic, the fascist, and the communist,
each of which is derived from the timing of industrialization and
the social structure at the time of transition. According to
Moore, the type of route a given country takes is determined by
the relative configuration of five factors: (1) the power
distribution amongst the elites, (2) the economic basis of the
agrarian upper-class, (3) the class constellation, (4) the
distribution of power between classes, as well as (5) the states’
autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant class. Above all, however —
and this connects Lipset and Moore — Moore stressed the
importance of the middle class as a necessary condition: “No
bourgeoisie, no democracy" (Moore 1966). Needless to say, the
bourgeoisie is most pronounced in capitalist societies.
A somewhat similar notion was more recently advanced by
Rueschemeyer et al. (1992), who in a historically profoundly
informed study identify the landowning class as the central
obstruction to democratization, while an organized labor class is
seen as most conducive. Thus, to the degree that it strengthens
the working class and weakens the landowning class,
industrialization fosters democracy.
By contrast, Apter (1965) argued that democracy as an end
should not be pursued at all levels of modernization since it can
bring about destabilization to the political process in
underdeveloped societies. Similarly, Huntington (1968) saw
socio-economic development as distinct from political
development when stressing the importance of political order. In
turn, order is jeopardized when the level of mobilization within
a society exceeds the level of institutionalization. In this context,
according to Huntington, economic development increases
political mobilization at a faster rate than the appropriate
institutions can develop thus leading to instability. Huntington,
however, changed his views on modernization to some degree
since in his influential 1991 work The Third Wave he does
consider modernization as one of the factors driving
democratization.
Ranking amongst the most widely studied themes within the
social sciences, the relation between socio-economic
development and political democracy has also been the subject
of an immense number of quantitative studies. As an inevitable
consequence no review can do justice to this breadth of studies.
Indeed, the question of whether a positive relationship exists as
outlined by Lipset has been hotly debated, with empirical
evidence on either side: while most studies do find a positive
relationship (e.g., Lipset 1959; Cutright 1963; McCrone &
Cnudde 1967; Olsen 1968; Jackman 1973; Coulter 1975; Bollen
1979, 1980, 1983, 1993; Bollen & Jackman 1985, 1989, 1995;
Muller 1988, 1995a, 1995b; Diamond 1992; Inglehart 1988,
1997; Muller & Seligson 1994; Burckhart & Lewis-Beck 1994,
Leblang 1997; Vanhanen 1984, 1990, 1997; Barro 1999), others
do not (e.g., Arat 1988; Sirowy & Inkeles 1990; Hadenius
1992).
Yet, much of this variation in the results can be attributed to at
least five reasons, as is partly pointed out in reviews by
Przeworski and Limongi (1997) and Sirowy and Inkeles (1993):

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Living Reviews in Democracy, 2009 | 2

1.

The results are influenced by the selection of countries
to be included in the sample, as well as the timing of
measurement.

2.

Results vary depending on whether simple crosssections or time-series cross-section data was
analyzed. In this context, mere cross-sections are
subject to the obvious critique that they fail to capture
regime changes.

3.

The selection of indicators for socio-economic
development crucially affects the results, i.e.,
differences can be attributed to whether economic
factors, such as per capita GDP, are employed, or
whether broader data on issues like urbanization or
literacy rates are used.

4.

The selection and operationalization of the democracy
measure is equally crucial, in particular the underlying
conceptualization of democracy, and whether
democracy is conceptualized as a binary or a
polychotomous measure (see Bollen 1993; Bollen &
Paxton 2000; Munck & Verkuilen 2002).

5.

Lastly, and partly as a consequence of the previous
point, the form of the assumed relationship impacts
the statistical results. In other words, depending on
whether a linear or curvilinear relation is assumed
affects the results.

In short, the empirical study of the modernization thesis has
been subject to intense methodological debate, and over time
more and more sophisticated models, measurement and methods
of analysis have been developed. In this context, it is one thing
to consider the conclusions drawn by individual studies, and it is
another to assess their validity at large. As a consequence,
thanks to accumulated knowledge, critiques and debates, more
recent studies are more advanced, and thus in the following
section we consider them in greater detail.

Recent Developments Part 1: Robustness
Almost forty years after Lipset’s first publication, Przeworski et
al. (2000, Cheibub 1996; Przeworski & Limongi 1997) publish a
series of articles and a comprehensive monograph “that hit the
field of political development like a bolt of lightening and
immediately changed the landscape” (Boix & Stokes 2003,
517). Przeworski et al. disentangle the relation between
democracy and development by asking an important question:
Does development bring about democracy, or does development
merely help sustain democracy once it is established? While this
difference was already acknowledged by Rustow (1970),
Przeworski et al. call the former the endogenous version, and the
latter the exogenous version of democratization.

democracies at higher levels of GDP should be less likely to fall
back to authoritarian rule. That is, once a country passes a
sufficiently high level of wealth, as measured by per capita GDP,
its probability of a transition to an authoritarian regime should
go to zero. By contrast, for the endogenous theory to be true,
Przeworski et al. argue that countries must pass a certain
threshold of development in order to allow for a transition.
In short, based on their empirical analyses, Przeworski et al.
claim that the exogenous version holds true; the endogenous
version, however, is false: Development makes democracies
endure, but it does not make them more likely to emerge.
Przeworski et al. find that no democracy failed above a per
capita GDP of $6055, Argentina’s level in 1975. Referring back
to Lipset (1959, 1960), they argue, somewhat vaguely, that this
is so because wealth lowers the distributional conflicts within
society “through various sociological mechanisms” (Przeworski
et al. 2000, 101), but fail to be more explicit. Moreover, similar
to Lipset (1994), Przeworski et al. emphasize the role of growth,
arguing that growth performance is nearly determinant for
democracies to survive, but not so for dictatorships (Przeworski
et al. 2000, 109). However, as is true so often for their extensive
empirical analyses, they do not offer a theoretical explanation of
the mechanism as to why this is so.
Yet, economic factors alone are not sufficient to account for the
fates of democratic and authoritarian regimes. Democracies are
found to be less stable when (1) they are more unequal to begin
with, (2) inequality increases, (3) when labor receives a lower
share of the value added in manufacturing. The same holds for
dictatorships: they are more vulnerable to breakdown when
inequality is high, and especially when they are poor.
Nonetheless, these patterns must be taken with skepticism, since
data on income inequality is scarce and differs in
operationalization, especially for countries that have undergone
transition.
Most importantly, however, Przeworski et al. reject the
endogenous hypothesis that economic development brings about
democracy. According to them, democracies come into being
almost randomly, with similar chances at all levels of
development. How Przeworski et al. arrive at this conclusion,
however, remains puzzling: Throughout the analyses contained
in the book, the estimated coefficient for the level of economic
development indicates a positive and statistically significant
effect on transitions to democracy, albeit smaller than for the
exogenous version. Their strict rejection of the endogenous
theory remained influential on verbal grounds alone, and the
inattentive or statistically less skilled reader was convinced by
their argument.

Using suitable statistical techniques3 to model transitions to and
from democracy, Przeworski et al. analyze a large cross-section
time-series dataset, encompassing a time span from 1950 to
1990, and a country n of 135. What must be determined, they
argue, is “how the respective transition probabilities change with
the level of development” (Przeworski et al. 2000, 92).
Assessing the exogenous theory, they argue that if it is true, then

In a powerful attempt to rebut Przeworski et al., Boix and Stokes
(2003) point out a number of shortcomings of the study. Having
demonstrated the apparent misinterpretation of the estimated
coefficient on endogenous democratization, they rebuke the
validity of the underlying assumptions of Przeworski et al.’s
model: If the exogenous hypothesis was true, as is claimed by
Przeworski et al., countries are more likely to remain democratic
at high levels of economic development. Thus, even if
transitions to democracy occur randomly at all levels of
development, after a long enough period of time, there are
simply few cases left to undergo a transition, especially at higher
levels of development.4 Instead, Boix and Stokes argue that one

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Living Reviews in Democracy, 2009 | 3

needs to “push back” the entire sample to a point in time when
no country was democratic.5 Boix and Stokes do this by first
analyzing a separate dataset encompassing the period from 1850
to 1950, and then merging their data with that of Przeworski et
al., yielding an 1850 to 1990 dataset. They then show that the
endogenous effect applies not only to the 1950-1990 period
analyzed by Przeworski et al., but that it is even stronger for the
pre-1950 period. However, due to immensely different
operationalizations of variables, this combined analysis is
questionable for reasons of data validity.
Others also take issue with the conclusions Przeworski et al.
draw. Inglehart and Welzel (2005) provide a simpler, yet equally
powerful critique of Przeworski et al.’s work. Arguing that the
separation between endogenous and exogenous transitions fails
to take into account the immense differences in regime stability
— the exogenous modernization hypothesis which Przeworski et
al. do not reject — Inglehart and Welzel use Przeworski et al.’s
own data to calculate the ratio of regime shifts to democracy vs.
regime shifts to autocracy for different level of per capita GDP.
The results send a clear message; the ratio increases
exponentially as GDP increases, indicating that modernization
increases the probability of transitions to democracy.
Epstein et al. (2006) provide a methodologically advanced
critique of Przeworski et al., again reanalyzing their own data.
Przeworski et al. “erred in their own analysis, failing to correctly
estimate the standard errors of the coefficients reported in the
Markov model, and that when doing so, they erred in a way that
led them to report the impact of GDP on democratization as
insignificant” (Epstein et al. 2006, 566). In other words,
Przeworski et al. misinterpreted their model in a way that lead
them to underestimate the statistical significance of the effect of
per capital GDP on transitions to democracy. When interpreted
correctly, the Przeworski et al.'s own models suggest that the
endogenous modernization hypothesis stands up well.
In sum, the statistical evidence we have to date strongly suggests
that both exogenous and endogenous democratization are
systematically associated with socio-economic development.

Recent Developments Part 2: Mechanisms
Inequality as Causal Mechanism
Of course a statistical correlation is not very meaningful without
a theoretical mechanism that explains the interplay of the
variables in a convincing manner. The question is: What exactly
translates socio-economic development into democracy, helping
democracies either to emerge and/or to endure? Boix and Stokes
suggest such a concrete mechanism for endogenous
democratization: income inequality. Drawing on Boix (2003),
they argue that “democracy is caused not by income per se but
by other changes that accompany development, in particular,
income equality” (Boix & Stokes 2003, 540). In this context,
they convincingly show that transitions to democracy pre 1950
occurred at lower levels of GDP compared to transitions which
occurred later. They also demonstrate that those countries which
violating the assumption of random sampling of the statistical model
used for the analyses.
5 This is not completely true. From a statistical point of view, what is
needed is an estimator that systematically corrects for unequal selection
probabilities, for example by means of a Heckman selection model. This
however raises the question of a suitable instrument for identification
(exclusion criterion).

attained high levels of income equality pre 1950 did so at lower
levels of development than those countries which did so later.
This, however, stands in direct opposition to Przeworski et al.
who had argued that authoritarian regimes are more likely to
break down6 when inequality is high, and especially so when
they are poor (Przeworski et al. 2000, 122).
Thus, in these newer accounts of democratization the
importance of income equality is central. Upon closer inspection
this very much follows the intellectual tradition of Lipset since
income equality, together with the level of economic
development as measured by per capita income, is merely a
synonym for the larger middle class Lipset had emphasized. In
other words, Boix and Stokes provide indirect support for the
syndrome of conditions of democracy (including a larger middle
class) emphasized by Lipset but their interpretation is different:
“As countries develop, incomes become more equally
distributed. Income equality means that the redistributive
scheme that would win democratic support (the one supported
by the median voter) would deprive the rich of less income than
the one the median voter would support if income distribution
were highly unequal. Hence, the rich find a democratic tax
structure to be less expensive for them as their country gets
wealthier, and they are more willing to countenance
democratization” (Boix & Stokes 2003, 539-540). This is of
course a synthesis of the qualitative works (e.g., Moore 1966;
Rueschemeyer et al. 1992) and the statistical findings of a
positive relationship between GDP and democracy, where “per
capita income, as employed in the modernization literature in
postwar samples, behaves mostly as a proxy for the more
fundamental factors” (Boix & Stokes 2003, 543).
In another highly influential contribution, Boix (2003) provides
an extended version of this theory of endogenous
democratization which can also account for the set of alternative
outcomes of transitions, i.e., “the occurrence of democracies,
right-wing authoritarian regimes and revolutions leading to civil
war and communist or left-wing dictatorships” (Boix 2003, 2-3).
With regard to democracy and development, Boix’ work is
particularly interesting in that it can account for ‘anomalies’,
such as oil-exporting countries, which according to minimalist
accounts of modernization theory should be democratic given
their level of development.7 That is, while Przeworski et al.
exclude these countries from their analyses in general, Boix
emphasizes not only income equality, but also asset-specificity
as a structural condition. In other words, the mobility of the
main assets in a society determines whether elites fear taxation
and redistribution that they cannot avoid when economic assets
are immobile and are thus threatened by the cost of democracy.
More mobile assets, by contrast, as they are found in more
industrialized countries, are harder to tax. Consequently, elites
fear taxation to a lesser degree. Thus, Boix (2003) provides a
general framework that focuses on structural conditions (Lipset),
but it also integrates the class relations (Lipset, Moore) and elite
choices (O’Donnell & Schmitter).
A similar framework is offered by Acemoglu and Robinson
(2001, 2005). Like Boix, Acemoglu and Robinson derive their
predictions from game theoretic models that draw on the median
voter theorem, and their focus is likewise on the interrelation
between economic inequality, the nature of assets, and
democracy. The differences are, however, striking: while Boix
6 Naturally, an authoritarian regime breaking down must be considered a
precondition for a transition to democracy.
7 For a discussion of the effect of oil on democracy, see Ross (2001).

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Living Reviews in Democracy, 2009 | 4

argues that democracy is most likely to occur when it is least
threatening to the elites, according to Acemoglu and Robinson,
the threat of revolution from below leads elites to consider
democracy as a lesser evil. More specifically, because
redistribution policies alone are not credible in accommodating
these threats (since such policies can be altered unilaterally by
the elites in the future), they argue that democracy serves as the
solution to an underlying commitment problem (see North and
Weingast 1989).
This explanation is grounded in a distinction between de jure
and de facto power: while the former is determined by the set of
institutions regulating access to power, the latter arises from the
immediate balance of power between social groups, i.e., social
classes. Given sufficiently sizable shifts in de facto power, the
middle class may push for a re-alignment of its de jure power
with de facto power,8 i.e., democratization. This occurs during
windows of opportunity, such as social or economic crises, or
(the aftermaths of) war. Democracy, revolutions or coups as
relevant alternatives (along with the status quo) are each
associated with relative costs. These costs, in turn, depend on
the societal and economic structure which ultimately shapes the
cost-benefit analyses. More specifically, democracy is least
likely in agrarian societies where assets are immobile and thus
easily taxed and/or nationalized. Moreover, democracy is most
likely when inequality is neither too low nor too high. The
reason is that in the former case (in a non-democratic country),
elites have much to lose and thus opt in favor of oppression,
whereas in the latter case, citizens have little to gain to begin
with. This leads to the main empirical prediction, a curvilinear
relationship between inequality and democracy. However, while
elegant in reasoning, the proposition remains to be tested
empirically in a systematic fashion. Here Acemoglu and
Robinson evasively argue that available indicators of income
equality, for example the GINI coefficient, do not adequately
operationalize their understanding of income equality, for
example, if it is between different ethnic groups (Acemoglu and
Robinson 2005, 59).9
In sum, despite offering the most encompassing theories to date,
one crucial aspect left out by both Boix and (perhaps to a lesser
degree) Acemoglu and Robinson is the question where the
demand for democracy comes from in the first place. In fact,
both Boix and Acemoglu and Robinson take identities and
demand as given. Demand, however, must be a core question, if
conditions should translate into attitudes for democracy to be a
deliberate outcome. In this area, others have made recent
advances.
Values and Demands as Causal Mechanism
To date, Inglehart and Welzel (2005; Welzel et al. 2003; Welzel
2006; Welzel and Inglehart 2008) provide what is perhaps the
most comprehensive framework by linking socio-economic
development and cultural prerequisites for democracy, thereby
revitalizing Almond and Verba’s (1963) long-standing argument
of cultural prerequisites for democracy. In doing so, they
directly address two problems in the work by Boix (2003) and
Acemoglu and Robinson (2005):

8 Note that this essentially follows the median voter theorem.
9 Interestingly, Acemoglu and Robinson show scatterplots for GINI and
levels of democracy, but fail to provide similar plots for changes in
levels of democracy, i.e., for the effect of inequality on democratization.

First, Welzel and Inglehart (2008) criticize these authors for
applying an overly narrow definition of democracy, as they
focus merely on the emergence of electoral democracies rather
than on effective democracies. According to Boix (2003) and
Acemoglu and Robinson (2005), the main struggle between
masses and elites is centered on the question of universal
suffrage – which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
democracy. Applying a broader concept of democracy – taking
into account a variety of political and civil rights and the degree
to which they are respected by elites – would allow for the
inclusion of people and their orientations, supporting the
argument that culture matters for democratization. In this
context, we add that this is somewhat ironical for the work of
Acemoglu and Robinson (2005) who distinguish between de
jure and de facto political power as explanations for
democratization but neglect the possibility that, like power, the
concept of democracy also comes in de jure and de facto form.
Second, both Boix (2003) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2005)
take pro-democratic mass preferences as given once a particular
level of inequality is reached. In other words, they limit the
mechanism of how economic conditions translate into mass
demand for democracy to the question of economic inequality
and the preference for redistributional policies. In doing so, the
authors omit to consider that mass demands for democracy may
come from different sources. They also neglect the possibility
that mass preferences and action resources may systematically
change over time or vary across countries with similar levels of
inequality. Implicitly, Welzel and Inglehart argue, the authors
consider mass demands for democracy as a constant. As a
consequence, the outcome of a democratization process is
limited to the reaction of elites and modernization is considered
only insofar as it changes the character of economic assets
(immobile vs. mobile) and the distribution of income. Whereas
this might be a historically valid argument, it is questionable
whether these mechanisms also applied during the most recent
wave of democratization (Huntington 1991). In particular, in
former communist countries, economic inequality was rather
low,10 suggesting an only modest demand for redistribution and
democracy. In reality, however, mass protest helped topple the
authoritarian systems, and the essential struggle between people
and elites was not about economic issues but about political
rights and civil liberties. Consequently, Welzel and Inglehart
(2008, 136) argue: “The major effect of modernization is not
that it makes democracy more acceptable to elites, but that it
increases ordinary people’s capabilities and willingness to
struggle for democratic institutions”.
Generally, Inglehart and Welzel want to shed light on the role of
ordinary people in the democratization process by (a) explaining
how citizens adopt values that push for and are conducive to
democracy and (b) revealing the link how these democratic mass
orientations translate into effective democratic institutions. To
this end, they pursue a two-step logic which essentially follows
Coleman’s (1990) bathtub model of a social mechanism. In a
first step, macro socio-economic development is linked to
micro-value change towards emancipative values. Here
10 Inequality measures from the transition period indicate that low
inequality in communist regimes was not only ideological rhetoric. In
particular, the Central Eastern European countries – those that
underwent successful democratic transitions – are among the lowest
scoring countries in inequality measures. See, for example, the Gini
coefficient (late 1980s) and alternatively, as Acemoglu & Robinson
consider this measure as inadequate, the Percentile Ratio 90/10 from the
Luxemburg Income Study (early 1990s).

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Living Reviews in Democracy, 2009 | 5

Inglehart and Welzel argue that socio-economic development,
for instance through rising levels of education and occupational
differentiation, increases social complexity, making people
cognitively more autonomous and socially more independent.
Inkeles (1978, 1983) referred to this process as individual
modernity, “the sociocultural aspects of modernization” (Inkeles
1978, 49). As a consequence, resources are not only increased,
they are also individualized, providing people with the means of
choice, as the most existential constraints on human choice are
diminished (e.g., Sen 2001).
Inglehart and Welzel (2005, 25) make an important distinction
when they follow Bell (1973) in his differentiation between two
distinct phases of modernization: industrialization and
postindustrialization. Both economic phases differ significantly
in the way they affect societies: Whereas industrialization is
accompanied
by
bureaucratization,
centralization,
rationalization, and secularization, people in postindustrial
societies show an increasing emphasis on autonomy, choice,
creativity, and self-expression. At the same time, and politically
most important, both processes have changed the way people
relate to authority.11
Industrialization led to a secularization of authority, shifting the
source of authority from religion to more secular ideologies.
However, these societies were still characterized by pronounced
authority relations and socioeconomic conditions that were
shaped by the disciplined, standardized and uniform mode of
industrial production. This is exactly why also other authors
have claimed that modern orientations are not necessarily
democratic orientations. Inkeles (1978, 49), for example, bases
his concept of individual modernity on orientations such as
open-mindedness, secularism, positivism, meritocratism,
rationalism, activism, or nationalism, arguing that some of these
orientations can also satisfy the requirements of dictatorship
(Inkeles 1969).
Emancipation from authority takes place only during the
postindustrialization phase, when the focus shifts from external
authority to more individual autonomy and human choice
(Inglehart and Baker 2000; Inglehart and Welzel 2005).
Economically, postindustrial societies are characterized by a
shift of the major workforce from the industrial to the service
sector where creativity, imagination and the capability to make
individual judgments are necessary skills (Inglehart and Welzel
2005, 28-29). The experience at the workplace does not leave
people’s value orientations unaltered, shifting priorities from
survival to self-expression values: “(…)rising levels of
education, increasing cognitive and informational requirements
in economic activities, and increasing proliferation of
knowledge via mass media make people intellectually more
independent, diminishing cognitive constraints on human
choice” (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, 29).
Moving up to the societal level again, when emancipative values
prevail in a given society there exists a strong demand for
effective rights: “Human freedom cannot be realized without
civil and political rights” (Welzel 2006, 875). Therefore, under
authoritarian regimes, when rights are constrained, people will

increasingly regard the regime as illegitimate, making effective
rule more costly and constraining the institutional choices of the
elites (Welzel 2006, 888). As Inglehart and Welzel put it:
“Authoritarian elites usually have enough power to repress mass
demands, as long as they control the military and are willing to
use coercion. But the resources that people invest, and the
determination with which they invest them in freedom
campaigns and liberation movements, can offset a regime’s
coercive power” (Inglehart & Welzel 2003, 218). In short, the
theory postulates that macro socio-economic development is
linked to micro-emancipative value change, which in turn has
the macro manifestation of collective freedom, where
democracy is the logical outcome. Inglehart and Welzel’s
argument is, however, not restricted to theory. Drawing on
survey data of global scope, they are able to demonstrate these
linkages which are robust even against controls of prior
measures of democracy, thereby countering the argument that
value change is a consequence instead of a cause of democracy
(Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Welzel and Inglehart 2006).
The empirical study by Inglehart and Welzel has also not
escaped criticism. In an attempt to reassess two of the most
prominent theories of democratic development, the theory of
democratic culture (represented by Inglehart and Welzel) and the
theory of economic development (represented by Przeworski),
Hadenius and Teorell (2005) address two major problems of the
Inglehart and Welzel study. Firstly, they criticize the “demanding
‘qualitative’ criteria of democracy” (p. 88) and thereby the
construction of Inglehart and Welzel’s dependent variable
(effective democracy) that weights the common Freedom House
data with corruption indices; secondly, Hadenius and Teorell
claim that there is no prerequisite of pro-democratic orientations
such as self-expression values for democracy, as Inglehart and
Welzel fail to distinguish between causal effects and correlation.
Not sufficiently controlling for prior levels of democracy, the
proposed causal relationship is spurious, as the lagged
dependent variable is missing. Once introduced, the authors
show that Inglehart and Welzel’s model does not hold (Teorell
and Hadenius 2005, 93). Welzel and Inglehart (2006) have
responded to this critique by demonstrating that Hadenius and
Teorell’s own model is not robust to the time of measurement:
firstly, using a slightly later Freedom House measure, the effect
of emancipative values on democracy becomes significant again
even when controlling for prior levels of democracy. Secondly,
Hadenius and Teorell’s decision to limit the study to a time
frame 1990 until 1999 largely disregards the successful
democratic transitions of the third wave, thereby only telling
half of the story. Leading back to the discussion of the
dependent variable in Boix’ and Acemoglu and Robinson’s
studies, this is more than a technical detail: The question which
democratic transition is to be explained is crucial, as
determinants may change over time. Whereas questions of
inequality, redistribution policies and mobile vs. immobile assets
were important for the fight for universal suffrage in the first
wave of democratization in France or Britain, these reasons were
probably less decisive for the collapse of communist regimes in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. For the third wave of
democratization, Inglehart and Welzel (2006, 90) can show that
democratization in these countries was largely driven by
emancipative values, less so by economic development.

11 Nevertheless, the authors acknowledge that cultures, even when they
are exposed to the same (changing) conditions, remain relatively
persistent, rejecting the notion of converging value patterns. So,
societies are changing, and they change into similar directions – but the
differences between these societies largely remain the same (Inglehart
and Welzel 2005, 19-20).

Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich

Living Reviews in Democracy, 2009 | 6

Conclusion
When in 1959 Lipset laid out the research agenda for
generations of scholars to come, modernization theory was
amongst the earliest empirical studies in comparative politics. In
this paper we have considered the bulk of empirical evidence
these scholars provided. Yet, it is notable that modernization
theory has experienced a recent revival thanks to Przeworski et
al.’s provocative thesis. While their disaggregation of the
dependent variable is ingenious, given the empirical evidence in
favor and against both exogenous and endogenous
democratization, we must concur with Geddes (1999) and
Epstein et al. (2006):
Przeworski and Limongi interpret their findings as a
challenge to modernization theory, though it seems to
me a revisionist confirmation – in fact, the strongest
empirical confirmation ever (Geddes 1999, 117).
Despite the challenges posed by [various authors],
rather than igniting debate, as would be right and
proper, [Przeworski et al.] appear instead to have
quenched it (Epstein et al. 2006, 551).

One more point on the Przeworski et al. debate has to be made:
From a theoretical point of view it is interesting to note that they
claim that the exogenous theory “is no longer modernization,
because the emergence of democracy is not brought about by
development” (Przeworski et al. 2000, 90). This argument is
plainly wrong, and it is not without irony that they quote
Lipset’s famous “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the
chances that it will sustain democracy” (Lipset 1959, 75;
emphasis added) on the same page. Lipset’s primary concern
was to assess what one might term an ‘evolutionary selection of
regimes’: which conditions are favorable for stable democracies,
and not simply what leads to a transition to or away from
democracy. Indeed, Lipset explicitly wrote in the introductory
section that “[t]wo principal complex characteristics of social
systems will be considered here as they bear on the problem of
stable democracy: economic development and legitimacy”
(Lipset 1959, 71, emphasis added).
That Lipset’s key result to this question — that socio-economic
development tends to bring about stable democracy — still
applies today is more than remarkable. As Boix (2003, 1-2)
genuinely comments on this: “Excluding Duverger’s law on the
effect of single-member districts on party systems, it may be the
strongest empirical generalization we have in comparative
politics to date.”
What Lipset knew in 1959 is, nevertheless, not all we know
today. While Rueschemeyer et al. note in 1992 that the causal
mechanisms “remain, in effect, in a black box” (p. 29), recent
developments by Boix (2003), Acemoglu and Robinson (2005)
and Inglehart and Welzel (2005) have disaggregated the
independent variables. This has contributed considerably to
uncovering the underlying mechanisms and opening the black
box. At the same time, empirical studies disaggregating the
independent variable modernization should be advised to stay
true to Lipset who had argued that modernization is a multidimensional phenomenon. In this sense, Lipset was careful not
to attribute direct marginal effects to any of the component
variables precisely because they are so intertwined in reality.
Thus, a true test of the Lipset hypothesis should consider the
joint effect of all components of modernization, or even their
interaction. Moreover, while Inglehart and Welzel have made

advances in the right direction, the causal pathways (as well as
the causal ordering) between the components of modernization
remain at least partially unclear.
In any case, the macro effect of modernization on democracy is
perhaps less doubted than ever among scholars. With these
insights in mind, political science has created valuable tools for
policy recommendation. Democracy does not come about
randomly, and for democracy to be stable it must come about
from within, since it is the socio-economic conditions which
create and maintain an environment for stable and enduring
democracies. Thus, for an effective promotion of democracy, as
it is part of many foreign policies, socio-economic development
must be a central component.

Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich

Living Reviews in Democracy, 2009 | 9

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